Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "The Paradox of Germany’s WW2 COAL Problem" video.

  1. Exactly right. In my Australian state, the bus companies were privately owned. They did alright during the depression when people could not afford cars and thus had no option but to commute to work and shops on the buses. But after WW2, a lot of people bought cars - enough to kill the bus companies' profits. So they could not afford to buy new buses, but were still providing about 70-80% of the transport of people. When their old pre-war buses got worn out and broke down a lot, it became an election issue. There was a change in the State Government, and the newly elected government nationalised the various bus companies into one big state owned outfit. The private companies would have had to go to their banker for capital funds, and pay heaps of interest due to the business risk, but a government is its own banker and pays very low interest, as it is practically risk free. For a few years, we still had the rotten worn out busses, but gradually the now government-owned bus company acquired new modern buses without increasing its budget. and with one big centralised maintenance depot, they go economies of scale and kept the busses clean and well maintained yet spend no more than the private firms collectively did. Everything was sweet until about 20 years ago. The buzzword was "privatisation" and all sorts of governments adopted a policy of selling everything off that they could. The State bus company got privatised. Guess what: now the buses aren't as clean, they break down, and there's even been quite a few catch fire and become total write-offs. And because the private owners can't afford to buy new busses as the old ones wear out, the State has had to come in and buy buses for them. The same thing with the phone company, which was government owned. They were going to roll out an optic fibre distribution network to facilitate cable TV and fast internet, to be paid for out of their own revenue, but the government decided that privatisation and competition would lower prices - after all, every one "knows" that private companies are more efficient and competition lowers prices, right? But the various competitors couldn't afford to put in the optic fibre, as they were busy driving each other in a downward spiral of prices. So eventually the government stepped in, created a new GOVERNMENT owned company to install the optic (NBN Co.), which they did, at a much lower performance and three times the planned cost, at taxpayer's expense, and no hope of full cost recovery. Just one of the reasons why I cringe whenever TIK says the solution to every problem is for the State to be hands off and allow free market prices. It frequently just doesn't work that way. State ownership doesn't work in all situations, but private ownership and free market prices don't work in all situations either.
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  2. This is another TIK video where he tells us the Germans lost the war because they partly centrally planned their economy and didn't have free market pricing on critical things. But Britain switched over to a mostly centrally planned economy for the war too. And the Soviets - well, they were communist, which is all about having a totally centrally planned set price economy - and they won the war, with British Commonwealth and American help. In peacetime, centrally planned economies and price controls are not so good - as proved by all the queues for scarce consumer goods in Russia in peacetime. But in all out war, it's the only way. In 1939 my mother worked for a factory near London making tiny electric motors for toy trains. Just before Britain declared war on Germany, some men "from the ministry committee' visited the factory, photographed the machines, interviewed people, got a list of all employees, their qualifications and experience, and took lots of notes. A little later, they came back, and said to the management "As of now, you will NOT make any more toy train motors. You will make small generators to this drawing for the RAF, and we will pay you cost (which we will check) plus a small percentage. We have determined that you can do this with the staff and tools you have. You won't need certain of your employees as are on this list, so you will let them go for service in the Army. You and your other employees are deemed to be in Reserve Occupations." (Story slightly simplified) That's part of how fighting the War worked in Britain. Centrally planned and controlled. And it did work. Resource allocated and price controlled. Kids could go without toy trains. With TIK's free market prices, some kids would still have toy trains, albeit perhaps only the ones who had well to do parents. The RAF would have less generators than they needed, AND the taxpayers would have to pay more for them.
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